Thursday, September 8, 2011

Brandeis University’s Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department houses a wide array of material from the Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center’s Samuel Gridley Howe Library. This collection includes several hundred books from scholars and experts in the fields of science, medicine, and disabilities; the papers of Irving Kenneth Zola and of Rosemary and Gunnar Dybwad; and thousands of pamphlets, case studies, and journals on topics ranging from what were then called feeble-mindedness and cretinism to eugenics and crime.

The material, which dates from the 1810s to the 1950s and is related primarily to North America and the United Kingdom, was compiled by the Howe Library from the school superintendent’s library as well as international libraries. It includes works from world-renowned doctors such as psychologists Alfred Binet and Edgar A. Doll, polymaths Francis Galton and his protégé Karl Pearson, Walter E. Fernald, Dorothea Dix (who championed for the rights of the indigent insane), Ellis Island medical officer Howard Knox, and eugenicists Charles B. Davenport and Henry H. Goddard, among hundreds of others. The Samuel G. Howe Library Collection’s academic scope is vast and will be of interest to historians of science and medicine, anthropologists, sociologists, and people with disabilities and their families.

What follows is a lengthy article that details the evolution of the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feebleminded Youth (later called the Walter E. Fernald State School), reflecting changing social and medical attitudes about mental illness and intellectual disability. Looks like an impressive collection.

Monday, May 9, 2011

I'm excited to say that the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center interviewed me recently about my work on universal design. The podcast followed up on a special symposium on "Food for Tomorrow" in which I presented some of my research about how new awareness of the needs of people with disabilities has changed design of kitchens and kitchen tools, including such examples as the Cuisinart food processor and (of course) OXO GoodGrips.

There is a great blog post by National Museum of American History curator Katherine Ott to accompany the podcast. Here is an excerpt explaining the origins of the term "universal design":

Universal design rejects traditional "separate but equal" facilities for people with disabilities. The original principles of universal design grew out of a 1974-77 Department of Education grant to architect Ron Mace that involved extensive product and architectural analysis. That lead to a working group to develop core principles for universally-designed facilities, which would provide for equitable and flexible use; be simple and intuitive; present perceptible and sensory information; tolerate error; entail minimal physical effort; and be of an accessible size and orientation. Mace used a wheelchair as a result of contracting polio when he was a boy. His early engineering and design talent resulted in numerous gadgets and adaptations and eventually a career in dismantling architectural barriers.

Listen to the podcast here. Thanks to the Lemelson Center for interviewing me and asking such great (easy ) questions.

In addition to discussing mass-market products like the Cuisinart and OXO, I also mention how people with disabilities themselves altered kitchens and other parts of their houses to make pre-existing spaces work for them. Here are some images from The Toomey J Gazette, the magazine "by and for respiratory polios" that ran from 1958-1969 (and then became the Rehabilitation Gazette). The images show (1) a kitchen sink with the cabinet below cut out to make space for a wheelchair, and a decorative curtain added to maintain a tidy look; and (2) a variety of storage approaches for pots and pans and pantry items, such as lazy susans, pegboards, and wall-mounted racks - all of which were common sights in 1950s/60s households, but here were selected for their particular advantages to people with disabilities. Images are from "Homemaking," The Toomey J Gazette, 1968.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

East Bay folks, take note - the new Ed Roberts campus, a community service center located at the Ashby Ave BART station in south Berkeley, is opening April 9. I am a bit fuzzy on the details, but I believe this gorgeous, universally-designed building with a large central spiraling ramp (reminiscent of the Guggenheim) will house several of the major disability organizations in Berkeley (but correct me if that is wrong). This image of the center (which I believe is a computer projection) is from worldarchitecturenews.com.

The campus is named for Ed Roberts, dubbed by some "the father of the disability rights movement," a MacArthur genius award-winning activist who lived in Berkeley for most of his adult life, starting in 1962 when he became the first student with physical disabilities to live on campus at UC Berkeley. Roberts was also a founder of the Center for Independent Living and the World Institute on Disability. Here's a picture of him and Herb Willsmore, a fellow student at Berkeley, at the University's stadium, from the Disabled Students Program Photograph Collection at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

In the image above, veterans from a post-World War I workshop at Walter Reade Army Medical Center demonstrate new attachments for their prosthetic limbs - such as a welding tool. Though these tools did not catch on as much in the US as in Germany (according to research by Heather Perry published in this book), the idea of a worker restored to function through such a tool was of interest to American medical and military authorities too. Image via the amazing National Museum of Medicine flickr set.

In another image, below, from the Science Service photograph collection at the National Museum of American History, a veteran of World War II demonstrates his new prosthetic arm to a group of ladies visiting a Washington exhibition in 1948. The exhibition showcased the results of a multi-million dollar (a lot back then!) project to improve the design of artificial limbs, including (in the foreground) using new plastics and hydraulic joints. (note: portions of the Science Service collection are online, but not those related to disability/medicine).

I thought of these images after reading this story on the Guardian on British TV Presenter Cerrie Burnell. Burnell, who was born without the lower part of her right arm, chooses not to wear a prosthetic limb. Since childhood, she resisted wearing "this heavy, uncomfortable, ugly, pointless . . . thing," finding a prosthesis more cumbersome than useful.

Burnell is not alone. Despite the improvements made after WWII, in a 1950 study rehabilitation doctors reported that as few as 12% of single-arm amputees wore prosthetic limbs - and of those, only half wore them for daily work and hobbies! The rest simply found it easier to operate using one hand. Limbs have improved (though not as much as you might think!) but I have heard anecdotally that the number is still only about 50%. Sometimes there really is no design solution for everyone - no product/technology at all might be the best.

The point that Burnell raises - that people would rather see an obvious prosthetic limb than the stump of her arm - brings up interesting issues about the kinds of disability prejudice or discomfort that exist our modern visual/technological society. Is it that people are more comfortable with plastic and metal - even though they clearly indicate a lost limb - than the actual flesh of an impaired body? Or that they want to see that the person is at least trying to repair/replace their disability - to make themselves more "normal"? Does the strangeness of a prosthetic limb somehow trump the taboos around physical difference or disability?

Given its frequent appearance in both sci-fi and cultural studies, there is clearly some fascination in our modern society with this technology that can extend or replace human function - or even, as in the case of recent carbon-fiber sprinting legs (note: legs, not arms), surpass it. After wars, the press scurries to investigate the state of prosthetic limbs, and the government funds massive new projects to improve them. As the images above show, the ideas of what constitutes an "improved" arm change over time - sometimes focusing on utility for particular jobs, sometimes pushing to include whiz-bang new technologies and materials. Despite all of this attention, however, sometimes the fascination about prosthetic limbs has little to do with the material reality that an individual person with an amputation or missing limb has to use this object, and they may just choose to go without.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

1. Steven Kuusisto on the "post-physical" fantasy of many technophiles -

We are, it seems, living in the age of the promissory “improved” body—yet that body is still stuck between the territories of production (politics), reproduction (material expense) and imagination (compulsory normativity).

Kuusisto writes that this ideal of a mechanized world that alleviates or "eliminates" disability is not a neutral product of technological innovation - it is the result of particular processes of imagination, wrapped in political concerns (i.e. who plans, who pays, who decides who and what gets to be post-physical?). In other words,

[the post-physical ideal] evokes Bill Clinton’s remark: “If you see a turtle on a fence post you can bet he didn’t get there by accident.”

2. Wheelchair Dancer on emergency plans - personal and administrative - for people with disabilities.

Katrina seems to have been a turning point in disaster planning for people with disabilities... Since then, I have seen numerous conference announcements, notices for research reports and lists of paper abstracts talking about disaster planning for people with disabilities. (An unfortunate side effect of all this good work is the now popular phrase "vulnerable populations.")

(note: this is an issue that also came to mind for me at the time of the inauguration, when officials suggested people with disabilities stay at home)

In the 70s, we were told we design for a Caucasian, 40 years old, living on Long Island, with 2.3 kids. We didn’t even really design for women. And if you brought up the idea of designing for people with arthritis, for example, they would say, “We don’t design for those people!”

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

I was just (re)reading Bernard Herman's material culture essay "The Bricoleur Revisited," from Ritchie Garrison and Ann Smart Martin's American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (1997) - the bricoleur, Herman writes, is a "putterer with a message" - basically us, scholars and lovers of stuff, picking through the detritus of history for little messages and meanings.

I thought of that figure of the bricoleur in this world of not just objects, but bodies. Disability studies helps us think of not all bodies as the same, and I kind of waffle about whether I consider that to be a material culture statement or not. (bodies are not objects, but they are part of the material world. I am not crazy about a lot of scholarship on "the body" however, because it tends to be singular).

Something I read today made me think of it again.. Steven Kuusisto (fantastic poet, blogger, joker, and activist, who is blind) writes about becoming an honorary member of the "Wretches and Jabbers," a group of non-speaking writers (apparently there is a new documentary out about the group), and visiting them for a meeting. He describes sitting among them, everyone typing out words on talking computers, jumping and lurching as they needed to or wanted to:

Suddenly I was in "a happening"--a cognitive, inter-active jam session with four men and one woman, each with an electronic keyboard. Stories emerged about loneliness and about being misunderstood. (People with Autism can tell you things about childhood that will curl your hair.) But there were also many joys for this was a kind of autistic rock and roll session. (from Planet of the Blind)

The bricoleur looks into a box of things - stones, shells, an earring, a shard of a ceramic pot - and constructs stories. I liked thinking of how that applies to modern life, our funny tools and sounds and the stories and connections they help us make. I don't want to say bodies are objects but they are part of the picture.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Above is a video that has been circulating in my facebook feed and various blogs, showing an experiment to see if altering the experience of walking up stairs would change people's likelihood of taking the stairs rather than the escalator. It's pretty cute and simple, and it's nice to see people having a fun time in the mundane setting of a subway station. This is not a strictly "accessible" form of design, though it does play off of choice between ways of moving through a place, which does have to do with physical access. And it makes me wonder - how much do designers think about stairs? Are they inviting, discouraging, or just plain functional? In a world when we often have the choice of elevator, escalator, stairs or ramps, could designers make these experiences more distinct?

When I first started this blog, I posted about the idea of a "world without stairs" - wondering whether an accessible world could actually mean the disappearance of such a standard architectural feature as the stairs.

I've learned a few things since then... one is, of course, that stairs are just one kind of physical barrier, for one kind of access issue. In fact, many people with disabilities prefer stairs to ramps - for example, if they use a prosthetic leg or a cane, that straight platform can be easier to use. The first ever Architectural Standard in the U.S. included not only measurements for ramps, but design guidelines for stair heights and angles that would not interfere with those who needed to drag their feet up the front of stairs:

(image: figure showing unacceptable and acceptable stair designs, from the 1961 American National Standards Institute's Specifications for Making Buildings and Facilities Accessible to, and Usable by, the Physically Handicapped, which became the guidelines for state and federal accessibility laws in the 1960s and 70s).

In my earlier post on stairs, I noted some architectural examples (such as the Guggenheim) that used alternatives to stepped surfaces as a design feature. These were not spaces explicitly designed for wheelchair use (in fact some of them might belong in the Facebook "Wheelchair Ramps and Access from Hell" photo collection), but might suggest ways of making access an explicit part of design, rather than an afterthought.

I was also thinking about ways that stairs themselves can be accessible or inaccessible. For those who walk up and down stairs, they can have a pronounced effect on how we experience a place. Think of the difference between ascending a grand staircase, feeling that you are rising up to an important and elegant place - perhaps like the Metropolitan Opera's lush red stairways - and scrambling up the narrow spiral stairs of a cathedral bell tower or a lighthouse.

In some cases architects consciously use stairways to dramatize walking through the space - in other cases, I wonder what thought went into a stair design.

At the Frank Furness-designed Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the central stair to the galleries has no handrail. The effect is subtle, but nonetheless jarring - your hand might reach out for something to hold, but instead you feel a bit out of sorts, pitched downward with no assurance. In the context of this historic building, we get a sense of a different time and a different set of expectations about bodily composure walking down the stairs. (Image shows a woman from the back, descending a set of stone stairs without a handrail in sight). In 2011, the museum has been designed to provide an alternate route to the stairs, but in its original design, Furness certainly made a distinct statement for those coming and going into this temple for art.

On a recent trip I discovered another set of museum steps that literally stopped me in my tracks. The newish Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati is the only American building by Zaha Hadid, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect best known for prototype or drawn work, so I was excited to visit while I was in town for a wedding. The sleek lines and geometry of the museum building are appealing, but the stairs immediately stood out to me - and not in a particularly good way. Criss-crossing the void in the main entry lobby, these stairs have a much shorter rise, and longer step, than we expect in standard staircases. They are so awkward to walk up that I almost wondered if this was an installation of the museum collection itself. As a long-ish strider I was constantly tripping up these stairs, and almost fell on the way up. I asked the guards if they had gotten used to them over time, and they chuckled, no, and confirmed that I was far from the only visitor to ask about the stair heights.

It's interesting to me to wonder how Hadid came to these stairs. Did she deliberately design something that would halt your walk, maybe prepare you to pay attention as you see the artworks? Is this an explicit message that we should not relax too much or feel too comfortable in a museum? Or are the stairs, like many functional elements of contemporary architecture, just the product of some low-level drafts-person who designs based on general instructions of the architect? In any case, I wondered if Hadid had ever walked up these stairs. They are certainly dramatic, but the ultimate result for me was to feel frustrated and a bit indignant - how dare this architect tell me how to walk! And of course, I thought of how these steps would feel for someone with a physical impairment - for whom that break in routine might be more than an annoyance.

Leaving the CCA, I decided to take the elevator down. In a world with stairs, we might choose to avoid them too.

About Me

An occasional blog for links and thoughts on my research on the relationships between disability, rights, and design.
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